This was for Eddie Kingston’s CHIKARA Grand Championship title.
I didn’t intend on writing about this here. Really didn’t, hand to God. Some reviews go on a forum, some go on the blog. Usually length has something to do with it, but I try to put the stuff that matters to me or that gets something out of me up here, and not a lot of the 2012 CHIKARA stuff I’ve been watching has achieved that. To be honest, none of it has. Eddie Kingston’s been one of the only good things in the company at this point, and even he’s felt somewhat diminished in the hangover of one of the most emotional title wins of all time at HIGH NOON the previous year. Still, he feels like a star on the level that nobody else in CHIKARA really does anymore outside of Mike Quackenbush, and outside of his opponent here.
On that note, this is Sara Del Rey’s last weekend in CHIKARA. It’s not her last match in the company for some reason, and it’s not her last independent match (and match period) as ROH wasted her yet again on a mixed tag team popcorn match teaming with Eddie Edwards against Mike Bennett and Maria Kanellis. That was a decent little match and a fun watch, but this is the one that feels like a culmination of everything she’s ever done. Sara Del Rey is the ultimate case of someone so far ahead of their time that it became a detriment. It obviously wasn’t entirely true all of the time, as there’s so much SHIMMER I haven’t seen, but for years whenever she fought another woman, Sara Del Rey seemed so far above everyone else she was wrestling. There wasn’t much debate about who the best womens wrestler on the indies was, because everyone knew. There were women around her who came close, and a few of the two thousand Daizee Haze singles matches were actually very good, but she’s someone who really could have been so much more if she came along five years later. A remarkable skillset as her better work showed, but as a result of the times and places save for the last year or so of her career when CHIKARA finally put her under the spotlight, she doesn’t have the resume that her skillset suggests she ought to.
Save for a very entertaining run through the 2008 Ted Petty Invitational, CHIKARA was the only place that really let Sara Del Rey wrestle her actual peers. It didn’t always turn out great, due to so much of that being in the BDK storyline and having to team with a sickly seeming Daizee Haze, or having the less than stellar opponents the crop up here and there in a fed/training school hybrid, or just the sorts of weird booking calls that handcuff people in CHIKARA from time to time. There was always something there though, and over the year coming into this, she was finally cut loose and allowed to work. She got to face and defeat Claudio Castagnoli, El Generico, Aja Kong, Meiko Satomura, and was the survivor of the 2011 Torneo Cibernetico, and every time she had a real chance, it delivered.
So, even if we only had this one final expression of what she could really do in a main event title match, they made the absolute most of it. Eddie Kingston’s had some fun title defenses, but to some extent, they all felt somewhat restrained. Eddie Kingston is great enough at all the fun little things as well as the big dramatic gestures that just about anything he touches and gets to control is going to deliver, but they were delivering in small ways, and felt more like great smaller matches that happened to be for a title.
This is an equally small show as any of them, but this is a big match effort. It’s one of the best examples in independent wrestling history of gigantic matches in small rooms. They had twenty plus minutes and they used it nearly perfectly. Sara outwrestles Kingston at the start and seizes upon his hesitancy to really lay it in by beating the crap out of him once she notices it. Eddie has a hurt right shoulder, and Sara goes after it when she needs to really make a point. She shit talks him, repeatedly asking if he thinks she’s joking now after an offhand comment Eddie makes after one shot. As you would have come to expect with any familiarity towards his work, Eddie’s so good at facially selling his frustration with not being able to do better, especially when Sara stomps in at the shoulder. Like always with King, he seems as mad at himself as he is at anything outside of himself.
He turns it up a little to do better, working the neck after a rare knee trembler off the middle rope. He returns every single favor with a receipt, and gets nastier and nastier. Eddie keeps selling the arm in little ways, and Sara goes after it whenever she needs an opening, and has to go there to make her initial comeback. They defy the setting and manage several really really big nearfalls, as Sara struggles for things and gets them later on for these select nearfalls that I completely bit on. I don’t bite on nearfalls that happen in matches I’m watching live, but these two got me to do it on a match that’s seven years old and change. It’s not just because of what happened in the match, so much as it is the retroactive frustration with a scene that so often failed to properly utilize such a remarkable talent, and the bittersweet joy of seeing her finally achieve something like this when the clock was seconds away from midnight, but I wanted this for Sara Del Rey so bad. I didn’t go into the match expecting a whole lot, but they absolutely got me. They completely got me, and I don’t know why I’m surprised that Eddie Kingston vs. Sara Del Rey under these circumstances got me like this.
Of course, that feel good moment doesn’t happen. It’s not just yet time for CHIKARA’s first female Grand Champion. Like Moses, Sara doesn’t get to enter the promised land, just to show the path and to guide everyone else there. Eddie had been denied these kinds of moments for years, and while he doesn’t appear to take any real glee in denying them to others now, he’s certainly not just letting go of it as he grows more and more used to actually being on top. Eddie guts it out through the minor injury and hits a few Backfists to the Future, with the busted arm lessening the impact so it takes more. He lands one to the back of the damaged neck at the end, and then disappointingly gets a Northern Sliding D to win. Not a horrible finishing move, but the match had worked itself to the point of having earned something more, so it felt abrupt in the moment. A real jarring and sudden loss. Maybe that was the point.
Incredible match. Sara Del Rey’s finest hour, one of Eddie Kingston’s all around best performances, and a really special match. One of the best intergender matches ever, and one of the last things CHIKARA ever did that really grabbed me like this. Eddie has a real long run with the title as its first champion, but if there was ever a time for a “thank you” win, it was here. Eddie Kingston doesn’t do happy endings though, if not on the way up, than certainly not when he’s actually on top.
One of the most gripping matches I’ve seen recently. Must see stuff.
HANDWERK 